photo by Michael Todd & design by Jake Fyfe
reviews by Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Michael Todd | photos by Michael Todd and Shannon Claire
On Tuesday, Lincoln Calling set alight its own 10th birthday candles. And it was only a matter of hours before the flames reached a full and towering pitch with Future Islands headlining opening night at The Bourbon.
The first of five nights of Lincoln Calling began at 6 p.m. with the Homegrown Film Festival at the Bourbon, featuring music videos from Nebraska bands and filmmakers, as well as a special re-adjournment of Pizza Court. Once the bands stepped out of their videos and onto stages, roots music took precedence at the Zoo Bar, with a Troubadour Tuesday show and acoustic offerings from Lucas Kellison. The Bourbon stretched its party muscles with Powerful Science and Life is Cool, so as not to pull anything by the time Baltimore’s Future Islands bathed itself in gold light to end a well-attended first night.
Read on for our full photo and written coverage of Lincoln Calling Night One, and see the schedule for Wednesday through Saturday nights further below:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Troubadour Tuesday at the Zoo Bar w/ Cory Kibler, Virtuopath and All Young Girls are Machine Guns
Powerful Science at The Bourbon
Life is Cool at The Bourbon
Undisco Wood at the Zoo Bar
Future Islands at The Bourbon
Schedule
Troubadour Tuesday at the Zoo Bar:
photo by Shannon Claire
If one of the promises of Lincoln Calling is that bands of diverse shape and style will share billings and venues throughout the festival, the tenth Lincoln Calling began Tuesday with a contrast on the same stage.
The first bout of Lincoln Calling at the Zoo Bar featured three unlikely in-the-round players.
Officially, it was billed as a Troubadour Tuesday, a regular feature at the Zoo Bar for singer-songwriters that can take on different flavors depending on the artists and how prone they are to jamming and accompanying each other. Tuesday night saw Cory Kibler, Virtuopath (Chris Bettel) and All Young Girls are Machine Guns (Rebecca Lowry).
Bettel appeared curious on stage with protest songs in non-standard tuning, many played with tapping. He’s been a solo artist since 2008, but the songs felt like the troubled orphans of hardcore, jam songs stripped down to acoustic guitar. In political line with the split cassette he released earlier this year with Orion Walsh, Bettel expressed unoptimistic views on the direction of the world, about the alleged and politically-motivated murder of journalist Danny Casolaro and in the morose “Embittered Womb” inspired by the barren society described in the film “Children of Men.”
The contrasts were immediate and barely reconcilable as Viruopath’s first song “Body Club” indicted America’s educational system and Cory Kibler lent the first notes of his nearly identical cherry Ovation guitar to a minute-long song about a young woman’s sex dreams with astronauts and marines. Kibler, a rare but longtime participant in The Sleepover and Demos, played solo showcasing a sweet voice capable of reaching great heights without twisting into a falsetto. He’d inject some moving melody parts with an easy-moving bass thumb on his guitar. Past the opening attention grabber, Kibler’s set calmed down and began to ruminate with songs about growing older and a little sadder all with a humorist’s eye for deprecation. On “Nature vs. Nurture,” Kibler insightfully crooned of identity-making: “The way that I grew up plus genetics in my blood creates actions seemingly unexplainable to me.”
Lowry, the frontwoman and creative force behind Omaha’s All Young Girls Are Machine Guns acted as the set’s non-wildcard. With a sultry Winehouse-esque voice, capable of cracking open for the booming high notes, Lowry was a steady hand on her minor-seventh-chord-happy ukulele. Lowry coaxed the crowd into acting as her full band with constant clapping on an otherwise mournful a capella song about lost love, which took on a Southern campfire flavor and drew the set’s heartiest applause. The silence wrapping itself around the claps and Lowry’s vocal throes was so crucial to the performance that bartenders walked on eggshells as they bussed tables, afraid of a careless glass clink.
photos by Shannon Claire
Powerful Science at The Bourbon:
photo by Michael Todd
As a youngster who never had the pleasure of seeing the now-deceased Columbia vs. Challenger live, let me be the first to brazenly state the following: Powerful Science is starting to look a bit like its father. At The Bourbon on Tuesday, the constant between the two bands, Josh Miller, was comfortable as ever at his keys. With his precise pitch-bending and crunchier tones, his playing could have occasionally been mistaken for guitar solos across a nine-song set at The Bourbon.
In the set’s focal point, “Haircuts,” he’d gesture with wide open arms, and he'd flex his biceps — in sync with a biceps-centric lyric — over a repeatingly funky bassline by Nate Luginbill. All the while, with lines like, "I've had better haircuts / This might be the worst one yet," the subject matter was lighter than the similarly get-down sound of Life is Cool that followed.
With his snare drum at a 45-degree angle (for maximum thwapping), drummer Peter Kapinos would join in on the vocals, too, and occasionally bust out a rap. His spotlight song, “Sentient Screen,” played like a Beastie Boys soundtrack to a blaxploitation film. With songs like "Chevy Belle Aire" led by guitarist John Freidel, the band proved their worth individually and as a group. And along with the vocalist changes, a variety of tempos — some changing mid-song, diversified the set.
Sure, the band looked great, too, like it was dressed for a high school graduation reception. But this is music that asks for at least one or two shirt buttons to be undone. Powerful Science keeps getting better.
Life is Cool at The Bourbon:
photos by Michael Todd
The difference 10 blocks in Lincoln can make.
On Friday, Life is Cool played an early-evening, opening set at the grand opening of The Railyard, a newborn concert setting still finding its feet. Barricaded in from a crowd of maybe a dozen interested onlookers, the Lincoln band’s set was understandably stiff. Not the case on Tuesday at The Bourbon, even with a setlist that seemed to be sequenced similarly.
Case in point: In their song “Mo and Gloves,” the band leaves a few seconds of space for lead songwriter/vocalist/guitarist James Reilly to sing “fuck the police.” Whereas on Friday, the line fell awkwardly at the feet of Canopy Street goers, including police, it sliced through the smoke on Tuesday.
Trumpeter Cam Breezy punctuated and peppered the pop-funk songs, Alex Houchin swung his drumsticks high, and Nate Luginbill, well, he conceded the stage to the band’s other seven members and slapped the bass from the floor. As Luginbill first loosened up his Powerful Science attire then shed a layer altogether, Reilly told the crowd, “If you’re not sweatin’, you’re doing something wrong.”
Tracks labeled “Fellaz” and “Kiss” on the setlist, newer to my ears at least, combined with a crop of mainstays such as “In This Tiny Town,” “Contraband City” and “JDWYD (Just Do What You Do.” On “Stay Cool,” Reilly most closely sang with a delivery not-so-distantly related to David Byrne’s. He and Kendra Wilde sang lines like, “It’s the beginning of time” and “I don’t need to know your name”: observations born upon a dance floor.
Those who stuck around last year’s Lincoln Calling through Sunday will remember Life is Cool’s debut at Duffy’s. And while no one was iced this time around, the band had reason to celebrate its first birthday. Simply, the band has done what it does: It stays cool.
Undisco Wood at the Zoo Bar:
photo by Shannon Claire
Nowhere is the technical flawlessness of Lucas Kellison more visible than when he gives himself nothing to hide behind. Not that his bands, formely The Assembled Soul or today's Undisco Kids, are shields for Kellison in live performances. But the sheer exposure of his acoustic trio Undisco Wood at Zoo Bar lent itself to some intimate “Kellison Unplugged” moments.
In Undisco Wood with upright bassist Danny Firestone and guitarist Dan Beard, Kellison not only has the opportunity to fully undress his own acoustic guitar playing and singing, but lets the audience appreciate some of the raw string clings and vocal swells that don’t always make it on to records.
Essentially, when Kellison and Beard join forces, you’re looking at the combined finger movement of two lead guitarists, and the pair work hard to not to make their presence together redundant. Double solos and harmonizing walk-ups are all over the acoustic jazz and R&B.
Because of Kellison’s work rate and the ease of access with owning and operating his own studio (SadSon Music Group), when he and his carefully chosen players leave the friendly confines of SadSon, the song selection can be unpredictable. Only three of the more than a dozen songs on Kellison’s The Young Rebel’s Art are currently out and Kellison talks in interviews of sifting through an entire other album’s worth of music. So it stands then that shows can represent rehearsals for new material and covers, including funk-flavored covers of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love.” Genre-interpreted covers inspired slow dancing and kept the technically advanced trio entertained.
Undisco Wood closed the set with “Breathe Again.” It’s a song that touchingly inhales and exhales against its own structure — held together by three choir-boy voices but instrument lines that speed together at the end of the phrases and punctuate in one funky “pop” and then silence.
photos by Shannon Claire
Future Islands at The Bourbon:
photo by Shannon Claire
Sam Herring’s right hand deserves an award.
At one moment, it’s a feather floating in a wayward breeze. At another, it’s turned to stone. And in a flash, it’s slapping the face of its owner, Herring, the vocalist and face contortionist of Future Islands.
On Tuesday in The Bourbon’s Rye Room, Herring’s right hand was connected to a body wearing a white collared shirt — gradually grayer from sweat — tucked into jeans whose knees and thighs had been eviscerated, presumably torn apart by that autonomous hand in a fit of rage. With a voice that would ravage a wild boar and then weep over its dead body, Herring led his trio of tourists from Baltimore through more than an hour of simmering synthpop with a dash of metal, marinated in Berlin-era Bowie.
As his bassist William Cashion and keyboardist Gerrit Welmers diligently played their parts with heads down, Herring sang about that “someone you can never say goodbye to.” He sang about “someone who went on tour for four months and lost everything he loved.” In “Inch of Dust,” Future Islands soundtracked “the part of you I have,” which Herring’s gestured made real through charades. At the end of the song, he then proceeded to eat those “pieces,” or at least mime putting them in his mouth, like an opera singer in an adaptation of Silence of the Lambs.
And when Future Islands performed an encore, rare for concerts in The Bourbon’s front room — since it requires bands to exit the stage and appear to be hiding out in the bathroom — bright yellow and subdued blue lights revealed a strong end to the first night of Lincoln Calling 2013.
photos by Shannon Claire
SCHEDULE:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska's staff writer, Michael Todd is HN's managing editor, and Shannon Claire is an HN contributor. Reach them respectively at chancesp@hearnebraska.org, michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org and shannonc@hearnebraska.org.